Voodoo Hypothesis  

Voodoo Hypothesis, the first collection of poetry by Canisia Lubrin, is a stunning debut that acts as a “rejection of the contemporary and historical systems that paint Black people as inferior.” Each of Lubrin’s finely crafted poems is timely, as she infuses them with pop culture, science, pseudo-science, and contemporary news stories about race. Lubrin’s crisp, pointed poems and keen sense of observation are breathtaking, quickly making it obvious why this collection is garnering attention across the country.

Exposed against this anemone August
is a way of unlearning the untaken graft
of leeching questions, a mischief starved in whys.

Why-because too much is the way
of knowing the chrysalis before
it crumples in the sun.

Mud-formed mirror of this sea-formed
rotunda reminds too much
of this face and will, like my mother’s

elusive redraft—pitch blood-knot
terra-form in the spilling
odd generations’ menses—

that must have started some sweet day we can only feign to rescue
from the old Carib cleanse
by test tube and accelerants,
rogue in empire’s wildfire ditched in our bays.

These are the many ways of love, saintly postures learned
in the books dye of our vogue distrusts, fighting the combustive, Antillean understanding of why,

the still-revolt of our bones’ sacred tow—inheritance, unmixable light
considered in the hummingbird’s mapless hum,
scattering this day, only just up, deep into the ground.

Why, even with twelve litany of litanies or reasons to stop
would they choose you
and sell you
and stamp you
and keep you—brief
and name you
and slit you down to kin
and name you
and call you
and breed you, bar you
and breed you, room you and jail you, jail you and cage you, cage you and cage you

Between us, that tune you love more than your life,
like honey is a thing said without need for panacea

Though I’d haven’t a few months
ago agreed, the other day okay’d it:
I’d have to dream to bring you back, heralding
midnight, the perfect crucible, your skull
like a harness for your purple prostate
though I could just as well go before you

My mind bell-off the passing sails
on a tumbling forest, gifting me
this silence or you, another way—
the sea. I have failed
you already, dear father
Ain’t I feared enough
your partial tongue,
too skilled at pirate & poison.

How I miss the days you’d answer
everything with a sigh

Post Ashes, Station II

If I had know, I would never have no children
Si mwèn té sav, ma té ka’i jenmen fè pyès yish

The chants in your regrets
mimic a wood-sound &
better in Latin: si cognovistis me, ut non habuerit prolem,
all my children, yet you have never been priest apart
from the bell you rung every Sunday
for three sharp decades of your life
while your last daughter’s heart
in the second pew soared like bird in chest

Do I balance the score if I tell you that
For a man with many offspring, you will know before your end
There’ll still be too few signs of you left
to keep a pulse, to survive—
to bury in the garden
to grow